from CLAUDIA LA ROCCO'S PERFORMANCE CLUB....

4.16.2012

"critique as performance"

Letter from Manhattan

With Paul Taylor’s choreography newly set inside the proscenium arch
of the theater that Lincoln Kirstein built for the New York City Ballet,
how not to read his work within that context, as well as the
overarching Taylorian one from which it springs? You can, for instance,
approach his new House of Joy as a gloss on Jerome Robbins’s seemingly innocuous Fancy Free (1944).Because
what do you see when a sailor saunters on stage in search of female
companionship, if not a visual echo?

Intentional, or coincidental,
there are clear correspondences. Seeing the Paul Taylor Dance Company
at the Koch Theater is like looking at it though a new lens. The
theater is larger, but the dances seems more enclosed. These dances
have always been self-contained worlds, but here they seem more so. You
can peer in. You can fall in, the way Harry Potter falls into
Dumbledore’s pensieve,
that stone basin filled with a silver fog of memories. And, as ever,
you can make stuff up about the dances. This is delicious, and fun, to
let your mind range around inside a repertory, finding things to think
about…. Why take Paul Taylor literally, I wonder? People seem to do it,
but while he is plain-spoken and unfancy in movement terms, he is a
fanciful dance-maker. Macabre, but fanciful.

Which leads us to the final weekend of the company’s three week run, and the Saturday Matinee From Hell. On the program: Oh You Kid (1999),involving among other amusements some larking about by the Ku Klux Klan, and an intermission; House of Joy,
that brief work—devoid of pleasure—about some hookers and their pimps
and their johns—with one undergoing a beating that looks suggestive of
gay bashing, despite the story line; and then after a pause, Big Bertha(1970),
a work of such utter depravity that it is a source of amazement to me
that it ever got allowed on stage in the first place. This was topped
off by Esplanade (1975)—which I adore as who does not?—but I staggered out after Big Bertha
to think over what I had just seen. It was so grim that the children in
the audience and their chaperones were invited to enjoy an ice cream
party during the middle two numbers.

Watching these pieces I wondered, Who are these people rattling around in the choreographer’s head?
That’s for him to know (or not know—his choice) but whether his
dance-making is displacement, projection, observation, fantasy, or what
have you, once it’s on stage it is what it is: art. Dance fiction.
What kind, from what period, for whose delectation, and their
contemporary applicability and relevance are currently popular questions
beyond the scope of the kind of thinking I do about these things. It’s
becoming trendy to call Taylor dated,
or cloaked, though really the only thing dated about him is some of his
latter-day costuming. Nothing stales like stretch fabric. In House of Joy, the
choreographer is possibly addressing these literalist critiques. He
casts his most beauteous female (prima inter pares in a stable of
pulchritude) Parisa Kobdeh as a vicious character of indeterminate
sex—her breasts are clearly there but she otherwise leans towards male.
A biker, in the market for a sado-erotic threesome. She doesn’t happen
to pick the sad wallflower hooker played by Jeffrey Smith. Like
Kobdeh, he’s not really successfully transitioned—he has huge biceps—and
he can’t walk in high heels. His gender is entirely smudged, and the
message seems to be: This is make believe, there are characters,
this is the theater, my mind is singular but my themes are plural. This
isn’t about me, and it isn’t about you.

Social relevance comes and
goes; but these dances are always relevant to me. First of all because
they are objects of beauty; and second, because they are interesting. (I
like thinking about matters like revealment and concealment.) Further,
love is always in season, and true evil never goes out of style.

Big Bertha is just that. Evil. It seems to show how an
unfettered libido functions outside the restraints of common decency and
common sense, this season via a true Apollo of the dance
theater—Michael Trusnovec, who elsewhere during the run was the sunlit
god at the center of Aureole. Trusnovec doesn’t look anything
like Evil, being a blond prince of lightness, but there he is, got up
in clothes from the Eisenhower Administration, and off to the fairground
with his wife and daughter. These two are a sub-plot unto themselves:
the daughter can dance up a storm whereas the mother is beginning to
trip—or always has tripped—over her own feet.

That’s an old story. The girl who outshines her mother. Otherwise,
this dance is totally Oedipal, except Oedipus here is not enjoying the
sexual favors of a woman who unknown to him is his mother—like say, Paul
Taylor dancing with Martha Graham in her company, when he was a
handsome young man, and she was a ravenous Jocasta, no matter the name of the roles she gave herself. So here’s the story Martha’s son Paul tells in Big Bertha: At
a fair ground, a decorous family happens upon a patriotic looking
nickelodeon. (Its name is the same as the infamous German howitzer, but
also serves as a portmanteau moniker for things that are large for their
type: Big Bertha.) The happy scene immediately spirals out of control,
until under the influence of this malign Freudian Jukebox, father
debauches and then rapes daughter, to carnival music. Meanwhile, mother
discovers dirty dancing, and stripping to her chemise, does some
suggestive things with her scarf. And we sit there slack-jawed at what
we are looking at. Exquisitely danced, exquisitely lit, exquisitely
designed, meticulous in every way. Fantasy is one thing. This is
something else. What it seems, and something else.

So let’s see. What’s going on here? Some people arrive on the scene,
just kind of happy-go- lucky normal folks. They torture an authority
figure with a wand into playing music and conducting them in dances. The
figure takes over, directing them in ways that are shocking and seem to
expose their darkest secrets. These are dancers, I thought, and Big
Bertha is Terpsichore, the Horrible Awful Muse of Dance.

And then I got it. Bertha is Martha. Because back when he
made this dance, Taylor was himself in it. He was telling his own story!
He was just an ordinary guy, handsome as the day was long, and he
wandered into Martha Graham’s studio and the next thing he knew, he was
up to his ears in onstage incest. These days, he’s moved on. And up.
Offstage in his studio, Paul Taylor is up on that platform now.

Paul Taylor is Big Bertha! The dancers wander in, and again and again
and again, they start him up, he raises his wand, and out pours
choreography. And the next thing they know, they’re cross-dressed
hookers. They’re the stuff of nightmares, of daydreams, of sunshine, of
sorrow. Whether Taylor enfolds us in joy or grief or melancholy or
horror or sentiment or comedy or introspection or retrospection depends
on I don’t know what. Maybe the weather. Maybe his dog at any given
time. Maybe what arrived in the mail. Maybe what he’s reading.
Maybe—and this is so likely it goes without saying—the music he decides
to work with…

The music. There is one last possibility. What if those people in Big Bertha
are attending a matinee? They buy a ticket, the apparatus jerks into
action, and people are made to dance. We make them do it. Time and
again, year after year. I don’t know whether to cry, or to laugh. But
this: when Paul Taylor takes a bow—still dreamboat handsome in his dark
suit—I rise at once to my feet. He tugs at me. He’s a man for all seasons and a man for all moods, and every spring since forever, it’s Taylor time.